


Vault 111

by LauraDoloresIssum



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Bye Shaun, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-30 19:04:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19409497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LauraDoloresIssum/pseuds/LauraDoloresIssum
Summary: Vanessa and Jake Amberson are frozen on the day of the Great War, while the world as they know it comes to an end. Kellogg makes his cameo. When they are finally freed from cryogenic storage, their only interest is survival.





	Vault 111

“War never changes…” Jake Amberson muttered, adjusting his tie in the mirror. Vanessa sidled in behind him.

“You’re gonna knock ‘em dead tonight, honey,” she said, opening the hair drawer in the vanity. “Have you seen my comb?”

He located it on the toilet tank and handed it to her. “How about we go for a walk later? Maybe drive to Walden Pond.”

“Hm. Maybe this weekend. I’ve got double shifts the rest of the week.” Her eyes were red and tired.

“It seems like work has been going gangbusters lately.”

Vanessa shrugged noncommittally, as she had to. She worked in a factory making military aircraft, which of course forbid her from discussing work with him. The bosses had been pressuring the women on the crew to quit for years, but with more and more young men being deployed globally, she just had to tread carefully and not give them any excuse whatsoever to fire her, as her painfully straightened hair attested.

“Just tell me if you ever need me to come to work and rough somebody up.”

She nodded tiredly. “Thanks, honey.” She took her comb and ducked out.

Codsworth was waiting for him in the kitchen. “Hello, sir!”

“Hello, Codsworth. I’d like some bitter burned coffee with plenty of grit in it, fried eggs like concrete, and toast that’s charred to a crisp.”

“A good try,” said Codsworth primly, handing him a plate of food with one cephalopodan arm, the day’s paper tucked neatly underneath it. “Unfortunately, I already made breakfast.”

“You’re supposed to say, ‘Sir, we don’t serve breakfast like that here,’ and I say, ‘Well, you did yesterday’.”

“Yes, a hotel joke, sir. Very funny and not confusing to my microprocessors at all.”

"I know, I know, I'm a bad person." He called softly into the other room, “Vanessa! Breakfast!”

“I’ll be right there!”

Codsworth attended to her part of the breakfast while Jake pulled up a chair to the counter. Out the kitchen window, it was just starting to get light.

“Master Jake?” Codsworth’s volume had decreased, and he sounded worried. He floated a bit closer, his back still to Jake, three eye stalks attending three different burners. “The missus seems exhausted lately. Is she not feeling well?”

“I think it’s just something at work.”

“Nothing _untoward_ , I hope, sir. She has said some things in my presence that seem to imply she does not get the respect a lady deserves.”

Jake sighed. He didn’t think there was a way to explain it that a robot would understand. “You’ve got a good heart, Codsworth.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He scanned the paper. War, war, a minor corruption scandal, war, crime in other countries, poverty in other countries, China’s latest acts of aggression. He sighed and sat on the couch instead. Vanessa took his place at the counter, eating an identical plate of food and reading the same paper.

Jake flicked on the tube. The 6 am news was on.

Arms reaching out. “ _Please_! Take my baby!”

“I’m sure it will be fine,” said the scientist standing next to the guard.

“Welcome to your new home. Everything is going to be fine now.”

He awoke with a start, making the pod shake. Everything was dark and quiet. He could hear water dripping somewhere. He felt terrible. Was he dying? He felt around the pod, but there seemed no way to release it from inside. Where were the technicians? Where was everybody?

A flashlight swept across the room. He raised a fist and weakly beat against the glass. Footsteps got closer. A weak moan issued from his lungs.

“Man. Everybody’s dead.”

“It says there’s still life in a couple of pods. There and there, and a couple more further in.”

A gravelly voice. “Let’s just get what we came for. That one.”

A group of shadows clustered around Vanessa’s pod. With a hiss, it opened. Jake beat harder, producing a muffled thump.

“Uuuuah. Ahh. Who…?” He saw Vanessa shift in the darkness.

One of them held out their arms. “Give us the baby,” said the gravelly voice. “He’s using your oxygen.”

“What baby? Please… I think I’m dying…”

One of them tugged the Hendersons’ infant from her weakened arms. Jake thumped loudly against the glass. The shadows looked around.

A figure approached and his face appeared in the glass. He had a knife scar. Jake mouthed weakly, _Please help us_.

The face surveyed him for a minute, then withdrew into the darkness. Then the whiteness rose up again and he was lost.

He rose to the surface of consciousness, wheezing. Air. There was no air. He feebly twitched, without even the strength to lift his arm anymore. He was cold to the bone. He was seeing lights. No air.

The pod opened, and a rush of hot oxygen engulfed him. He filled his lungs weakly. They could barely inflate. For a while he leaned there, eyes closed, just trying to breathe.

Eventually, he staggered out, and fell. Vanessa’s pod was open. Her eyes were parted and glazed, her head tilted onto her shoulder. Her throat was working, and he could hear a high-pitched wheeze. He crawled toward her and stood, steadying his weight on the pod. He was shaking like a leaf.

“Honey? Honey?”

She wheezed louder, and closed her eyes. After a second, she coughed. He slumped on her, his hands around her shoulders.

“It’s gonna be alright. Gonna be alright.”

A freezing hand weakly went onto his back. They stayed there for a while, just feeling each other breathe. They were both covered in melting ice.

“Alright, honey, we gotta stand. You gotta stand, all right? Come on, just…” He supported her and they stumbled out together. The Vault suits sagged on them in places they shouldn’t. There was a klaxon going off somewhere.

“I can’t walk,” Vanessa breathed in his ear.

“Just keep trying.”

Every step they took, it got a little easier. They staggered out of the room with all the pods, and into the corridor. There was a loud scurrying sound, like beetles or mice. They found a room that looked to be full of bunk beds, and sat down on it. The klaxon continued.

“There was a man,” Vanessa mumbled.

He gently laid her down. “I know, I know, I saw him too.”

Sher weakly clutched the blanket around herself. “Who were those people? Why did they take… what was his name?”

Jake rubbed his forehead. “Matthew. I think. The Hendersons’ boy.”

“They tricked us.” Her lips were cracked. He could still see the yellow lipstick she had put on that morning. “Those _bastards_. I always thought Vault-Tec… but there was no time…” She sat up. “Is there any water?”

Jake swallowed into his parched throat. He felt very dizzy. His stomach was a boiling, agonized pit of acid. “I don’t know.”

“I’m gonna go look for some water,” she muttered, and shuffled out, the blanket held around her like an invalid. A few seconds later, he heard a water fountain running. He pushed himself up and went out into the hall. Wordlessly, she stepped away from the water fountain. His lips were so cracked it hurt to drink, but he took as much as he could until he started feeling sick. No food in his stomach to settle things down.

Vanessa rubbed some of the water off of her suit. “I think it was Mr. Henderson who was named Matthew. God, I’m hungry.”

The gnawing pit in his insides had to agree. “Maybe there’s something here.”

A desultory search of the barracks yielded a full box of, of all things, Sugar Bombs cereal, hidden behind a rusted locker. Without a word, they each downed half.

Jake rubbed his arms. “Now what?”

“I don’t know, dear, how about we go home and eat a Jell-O mold and think about it?” She touched the burned part of her face. “God, imagine all those people who died in their homes. I’d rather at least be outside when it took me.”

“We’re alive. We’re alive, we made it.” Jake looked around. “Assuming we can survive alone down here.”

The siren continued, distorted and interrupted by static. He caught the word ‘evacuate’.

“Did you see any other pods open?”

“No. We should see if there’s a manager’s office.”

They walked unsteadily out. There wasn’t much of the place to search — the commissary, the storage, the barracks, the bathrooms, and fifteen rooms full of pods. Some were open and clean, most full of desiccated, icy bodies. In the head office, Vanessa sat down at the supervisor’s terminal and started rapidly typing. There were a few submissive beeps.

“Looks like the scientists got fed up with the cryogenics project once their food started running out and staged a mutiny to leave. Would explain why there’s not much left in the other rooms. Hold on.”

An empty bookshelf slid to one side, revealing a wire storage cage. The shelves inside were still full. She grinned.

Jake turned and looked at her. “How did you do that?”

“I… might have had to hack my boss’s computer a few times for a raise. Had to pay for the rods to go to work somehow.”

He laughed and started wedging open crates, all blue and marked, VAULT-TEC: PRIORITY on the side. “Honey, I love you. Food, water. Bullets!” He picked up a ten millimeter handgun and started checking it over.

“The life support systems are failing. It says here that somebody rerouted all the power from the dead pods into the four that were still functioning. That same person also set an automatic shutoff once the life support started degrading so everything would open. But this was long after the scientists all left. The authorization is too degraded, it’s all hashed up. Something with a K?”

Jake looked around as he carefully wedged the gun into his belt and stuffed his pockets with ammo clips. “ _Four_ pods?”

She shook her head. “No life signs, it says. And the place is very slowly filling up with carbon mono. Don’t think we should stay here more than a day.”

He knelt down and began shoveling material into the stained bag they had found. “What are those big wristwatch things?” He took one and strapped it on. It covered his whole forearm. “It looks like some kind of computer. There’s controls on the right side.” He felt it tighten around his arm. “Uh oh. It says it engaged some kind of biometric lock.”

“Here, let me see.” She took one and tapped a few buttons. “The Pip-Boy 3000 Mark IV? It has a user’s manual.” She scanned it. “This looks valuable.”

“Well, tell me if you see any way to get the darn thing _off_.”

One crate had a brittle, yellowed note stapled to the top. Jake read aloud, “‘Tell those idiots at Central to stop fooling around. We didn’t requisition any… gecks?’ What’s a geck? Do they mean _geckos_?” He had a horrified image of two hundred eyeless preserved geckos, vacuum-sealed in plastic like supermarket fish.

Vanessa shrugged.

“‘Our test subjects are going to be in cryostasis until they die. _Why_ would we need these? If 76 ends up with no gecks because of a clerical error, you’re the one getting the axe, Gary. Send these back tomorrow.’”

He pulled up the lid of the crate. Gecks turned out to be a pair of thick silver briefcases. Each one said G.E.C.K. on the side in large, friendly letters.

He shrugged. “I guess we take one each? Maybe they’re like radios.”

“Maybe they’re those foldable briefcase cars the government kept promising. And we should pack an extra of those computer things in case one gets broken.”

He hefted the bag. “I put any more in this, it’ll split.”

She pulled one from the box and looped it loosely around her upper arm, still going through the user’s manual. “It says we should cover our eyes with some sort of patented goggles. Otherwise we’ll go blind when we’re exposed to the sun again.”

“It says that?”

“Mm hmm. There’s an entire Vault Disbursement section in here. The goggles should be near the front entrance.”

It seemed like a million years since they had been shuffled through these halls with two hundred other exhausted, terrified refugees. The walls were cracking and the pipes were exposed. In some places, the ceiling had fallen in. They walked through the defunct radiation cleaners and to the front entrance with the swinging gates. The Vault’s great door was standing open. They stood a little closer together, staring at it.

“My Geiger counter’s not going off,” Jake said finally. “Shouldn’t it?”

“Depends how long we’ve been asleep.” They both stared at the outline of the circular stairs beyond the door. God, those stairs. He remembered the stairs.

“Can’t we take the elevator instead?” Vanessa asked, echoing his thought.

“Right now, eye protection.”

They searched the nearby closets. Vanessa held up two branded goggles, clumsily fixed with duct tape. “Looks like someone threw these out. Hope they work.”

They stepped onto the walless cargo elevator together. Around them, the stairs spiraled up an infinite well into darkness. Vanessa plugged her Pip-Boy in and Jake loaded the ten millimeter nervously as they began to rise.

“Now _I_ feel like an ICBM,” said Jake, humorlessly.

Vanessa’s hand closed around his. “Honey?”

“Yeah.”

“What if there’s nothing outside?”

“Then… I guess we’re fucked.” They both giggled slightly.

Finally, the external blast doors opened.

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to the 11/22/63 Hulu miniseries, for stealing your character name. It's all about time travel and when I was designing the characters over four years ago I thought it was a cute joke. It's actually a complete coincidence that Vanessa [Spoiler Redacted].
> 
> Sharp-eyed readers will notice my gecko confusion reminds them of Fallout 2. On a related Obsidian note, I recently started playing New Vegas and it's great.
> 
> As always, I love people pointing out typos I missed or things I can improve. Deserved compliments are fine too. Specific craft compliments are better.


End file.
